Faecal microbiota transplants: a disgusting yet intriguing idea, which has taken off in the last few years.
This seemingly unhygienic practice came into being after a landmark study was published in 2006, about the gut bacteria of mice. It was shown that the gut bacteria of fat and thin mice differ greatly. It also appeared that this was similar to in humans, as when gut bacteria from a thin human was given to a fat mouse, it lost weight, even on the same diet, and if a thin mouse was given fat human gut bacteria, the mouse got fat.
Soon after this study, this area of research exploded, and soon scientists had found links between the microbes found in human guts and obesity, colon cancer, rheumatoid arthritis, allergies and diabetes. Connections have also been found in mice between their gut bacteria and both depression and multiple sclerosis.
These discoveries have therefore given rise to faecal microbiota transplants (FMT). The main use for them currently (since 2013) is as a treatment for patients who have been infected with antibiotic resistant Clostridium difficile (C. Difficile). This has led to the survival rate increasing from fewer than a third to 94%. FMT is now also being used experimentally to treat other conditions (mainly gastrointestinal diseases and neurological conditions) , such as IBS, colitis, chronic diarrhoea, Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and Parkinson's, and now at least 10,000 people in the West have had FMTs.
This rapidly climbing number has caused Doctors at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to open the first and largest "stool bank" in the world, OpenBiome. Here, donors' faeces are screened, anonymised, given code names (for example Professor Dumpledore and Vladimir Pootin), and then usually shipped to hospitals or other institutes to be studied.
To find out more about FMT and OpenBiome, see their website here.
Emily Lauterpacht
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